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Questions to ask during an interview (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by buxton@programming.dev to c/experienced_devs@programming.dev

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I was wondering if anyone else had any questions they always asked the interviewer in the "we'll give you five minutes at the end to ask us questions" bit in interviews.

Personally I always ask what the staff turnover rate is. Mainly because in my first dev job I was one of four people who started on the same day. One of the other guys left after two days, I left after six weeks, and another guy left after two months.

Another I'll be asking after my current job is if they have a mainframe. I've now worked at three companies with mainframes and they all were old corporations where they were outsourcing loads of stuff to unhelpful companies (often IBM) which generally meant lots of headaches.

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[–] OmnislashIsACloudApp@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lots of questions, I haven't moved jobs in a while because I'm happy where I am but I've added to these even when interviewing people to join my team.

what is your policy for overtime or comp time when there are evening or weekend emergencies?
how often do people tend to need to be available outside of standard working hours?
what does success in this position look like for me 6 months down the road?
how often do tasks and priorities change last minute?
how long has the average person been on the team?
what is the policy on sick days, vacation days, etc
what is the remote work policy
how flexible are they on work hours? if it's a salary position, generally you will have work to do, but many bosses won't care if you take a 2-hour lunch and do some grocery shopping or whatever. as long as overall you're doing your work and getting things sorted.
when interviewing with team members instead of just the new management, it's a good idea to ask them about the managers style, and what they like about working there.
(generally by the interview you should have some idea of what the actual job entails, but if not, ask a bunch of questions related to that. what kind of system are you developing for, is it primarily supporting new feature or handling sustaining issues, what languages are used, what is the environment, etc)

[–] tgv@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Over here, it's customary that some HR rep tells you most of that. There usually is a handbook with all the rules, so they know it by heart.

A question I find important is financial stability and outlook. How is the company doing? How's the market? What's the prognosis for staying afloat? Are they sure it will survive 1 year? 2 years? 5 years? These questions have different answers for different stages: a startup's outlook can be determined by the need for VC capital, an established small-to-medium sized company depends on the state of the economy, so buffers are important.

[–] buxton@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Even if HR is supposed to answer that I'd still ask the people doing the work. Often HR have a rose tinted view of things compared to the reality that the developers see. I remember having an exit interview where I told HR how bad things really were and they just refused to believe that it was real because no one had told them.

As for financial stability, I'd rather look at things like crunchbase or some finance website just to find the details. I've found a lot of people working for a company will put a positive spin on everything because they'll often be trying to convince themselves they've made a good choice to remain at the company. Essentially, it's a sunk cost fallacy.